Anna Karenina eBook

“Eh! our conversation yesterday?” said
Levin, blissfully dropping his eyelids and drawing
deep breaths after finishing his dinner, and absolutely
incapable of recalling what their conversation yesterday
was about.

“I think you are partly right. Our difference
of opinion amounts to this, that you make the mainspring
self-interest, while I suppose that interest in the
common weal is bound to exist in every man of a certain
degree of advancement. Possibly you are right
too, that action founded on material interest would
be more desirable. You are altogether, as the
French say, too primesautiere a nature; you
must have intense, energetic action, or nothing.”

Levin listened to his brother and did not understand
a single word, and did not want to understand.
He was only afraid his brother might ask him some
question which would make it evident he had not heard.

“So that’s what I think it is, my dear
boy,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, touching him on
the shoulder.

“Yes, of course. But, do you know?
I won’t stand up for my view,” answered
Levin, with a guilty, childlike smile. “Whatever
was it I was disputing about?” he wondered.
“Of course, I’m right, and he’s
right, and it’s all first-rate. Only I
must go round to the counting house and see to things.”
He got up, stretching and smiling. Sergey Ivanovitch
smiled too.

“If you want to go out, let’s go together,”
he said, disinclined to be parted from his brother,
who seemed positively breathing out freshness and
energy. “Come, we’ll go to the counting
house, if you have to go there.”

“How’s Agafea Mihalovna’s hand?”
said Levin, slapping himself on the head. “I’d
positively forgotten her even.”

“It’s much better.”

“Well, anyway I’ll run down to her.
Before you’ve time to get your hat on, I’ll
be back.”

And he ran downstairs, clattering with his heels like
a spring-rattle.

Chapter 7

Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform
the most natural and essential official duty—­so
familiar to everyone in the government service, though
incomprehensible to outsiders—­ that duty,
but for which one could hardly be in government service,
of reminding the ministry of his existence—­and
having, for the due performance of this rite, taken
all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably
spending his days at the races and in the summer villas.
Meanwhile Dolly and the children had moved into the
country, to cut down expenses as much as possible.
She had gone to Ergushovo, the estate that had been
her dowry, and the one where in spring the forest had
been sold. It was nearly forty miles from Levin’s
Pokrovskoe. The big, old house at Ergushovo
had been pulled down long ago, and the old prince